All this immense literary work had the direct support and coöperation of Mr. Bartlett’s wife, who was the daughter of Sidney Willard, professor of Hebrew in Harvard University, and granddaughter of Joseph Willard, President of Harvard from 1781 to 1804. She inherited from such an ancestry the love of studious labor; and as they had no children, she and her husband could pursue it with the greatest regularity. Both of them had also been great readers for many years, and there is still extant a manuscript book of John Bartlett’s which surpasses most books to be found in these days, for it contains the life-long record of his reading. What man or woman now living, for instance, can claim to have read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” faithfully through, four times, from beginning to end? We must, however, remember that this was accomplished by one who began by reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when he was but three years old, and had gone through the whole of it at nine. There came an event in Bartlett’s life, however, which put an end to all direct labors, when his wife and co-worker began to lose her mental clearness, and all this joint task had presently to be laid aside. For a time he tried to continue his work unaided; and she, with unwearied patience and gentleness, would sit quietly beside him without interference. But the malady increased, until she passed into that melancholy condition described so powerfully by his neighbor and intimate friend, James Russell Lowell,—though drawing from a different example,—in his poem of “The Darkened Mind,” one of the most impressive, I think, of his poems. While Bartlett still continued his habit of reading, the writing had to be surrendered. His eyesight being erelong affected, the reading also was abandoned, and after his wife’s death he lived for a year or two one of the loneliest of lives. He grew physically lame, and could scarcely cross the room unaided. A nervous trouble in the head left him able to employ a reader less and less frequently, and finally not at all. In a large and homelike parlor, containing one of the most charming private libraries in Cambridge,—the books being beautifully bound and lighting up the walls instead of darkening them,—he spent most of the day reclining on the sofa, externally unemployed, simply because employment was impossible. He had occasional visitors, and four of his old friends formed what they called a “Bartlett Club,” meeting at his house one evening in every week. Sometimes days passed, however, without his receiving a visitor, he living alone in a room once gay with the whist-parties which he and Lowell had formerly organized and carried on.